Hard Lines
© Suzanne Bosworth
Published byThe Plaza – a space for global human relations

  An eight year old thug might be considered an unlikely source of inspiration for the pleasure in using a particular pen. But there is it: in writing to friends, or signing away chunks of my bank balance to the Gas Company, it's down to a boy called Timothy that such things are written with a pen, ink and a great deal of care rather than just slung down any old how.
  The pen is nothing special. Black plastic casing, gilt clip. Black ink. Not cartridges, but from a chunky bottle that squats like a toad in a box. A medium italic nib, to see lines curve and take shape in a graceful architecture.
  Filling it is a moment of peace: a shift, a change, a quiet attention. Like sharpening a chisel to better define an angle in stone, or squeezing more oil paint onto an artist’s glass there is thought and care in the filling.
  Tapping the reservoir. A splutter of air. Dipping the nib down into the dark gleam, drawing up a narrow, inch-long column of black.
  There hasn't always been the time. For years, writing was nothing more than a scribbling of dates and signatures; notes dashed off without a thought beyond the immediate need to pass on information.
  It's only now, having stopped whistling along at quite such speed, that a love of the careful deliberation of writing has clicked in.
  It isn't something I remember appreciating at eight years old. But at that age, I didn't appreciate intangible concepts like creativity and elegance, or that it could be a pleasure, or even a necessity, to write anything at all. And in a shifting, shouting amorphous mass of forty juniors, all fists and mud, not a great deal of information and example was going to go in one side and stay there.
  One thing that has stayed there, for thirty five years, carved as deep as initials in a desk lid, is the day Timothy brought his brand new birthday biro to school.
  The biro had a green casing, with a silver clip that you pressed down and round on a spring to make it work, and which made a distinctive clicking noise especially if you kept pressing it up and down.
  He produced it carefully from his shirt pocket in Mr Green's english grammar lesson to write, for the imminent enthralment of us all, the required five sentences of what he had done at the weekend.
  Timothy usually couldn't stay still for more than a minute. He was a wriggler. A chairleg kicker. He'd stick his head under the desk lid, punch anyone within arm's reach, flick blue-black ink pellets.
  Writing, however, had him lost and dreaming.
  Mr Green was considered by us to be so old as to be practically dead. His teaching methods were lifeless - he would write yard after boring yard of text on the blackboard, expecting us to copy it out word for word in our red exercise books: God help you if you didn't keep up. He chalked words in huge blue letters on the door and the wall; they were horrible, modern words, he said: cheap and nasty. We must never use them. They were words like 'NICE' and 'AIN'T'.
  And 'BIRO'.
  Despite imminent death Mr Green had a good aim with the blackboard eraser and bits of chalk. And you usually learned quite soon, as part of your school survival strategy, what to avoid doing in Mr Green's lessons if you didn't want red weals caned into your palm.
  Mr Green slid from his high desk by the window and glided to where Timothy clicked and thought and wrote, nose an inch from the paper and tongue moving at the corner of his mouth like a fat, questing worm. The sudden, breathless quiet weighed down on the room like an impending rock fall. You wanted to warn Timothy of the awful horror closing in on him. You really wanted to.
  We sat goggling like rabbits caught in glare as Mr Green reached from behind Timothy with a thumb and forefinger extended together like a beak, the other fingers splayed in sinister precision, and snatched the biro from Timothy's fist.
  Caught by surprise and Mr Green's grip on a handful of his hair, Timothy crouched pop-eyed, raked by the cruel fascinated stare of children grateful for someone else, anyone else but themselves, copping it from Mr Green.
  We watched Timothy's face to see what he would do. Maybe he'd yell and turn purple, or go completely mad, or perhaps even burst. We were curious, shameless voyeurs, horribly fascinated to see just what could happen before you couldn't stand it any more.
  But Timothy didn't shout, or burst, or turn purple.
  He just cried.
  Mr Green revealed to us his deep loathing of biros. They were a vile curse of the modern day, he said, bought by stupid people who had no imagination.
  He thought that everyone should use ink pens in order to maintain an elegant hand, which meant nothing to us whose handwriting usually resembled nothing more legible than ancient runes half concealed behind lichen: our ink pens were the long dippers with nibs that blotted, scratched, spat and crossed horribly.
  Mr Green's peroration concluded with his plucking Timothy from his seat, pincering a thumb and forefinger on his ear and leading him to the front of the class. Mr Green then held up the biro in front of us all, handed it to Timothy, and told him to break it.
  We gawped, in a wretched sort of way.
  Any thoughts of bravado or heroism we'd read about in Beano  or The Eagle fizzled out like cheap sparklers. This was no strip cartoon with goofy speech bubbles or villains getting their just desserts. This was Nightmare on Bash Street.
  I'm not sure what happened to the bits of Timothy's biro.
  But what remains is a collection of frozen, faded images, like photographs in an album without the narrative in between.
  And a bittersweet attention to the quiet happiness of writing.